The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Connie's mother asks her to sell an abandoned house once owned by her grandmother in Salem, Mass. Relunctantly, Connie moves to the small town and inhabits the crumbling, ancient house, trying to restore it to a semblance of order. Curious things start to happen when Connie finds the name "Deliverance Dane" on a yellowed scrap of paper and begins to have visions of a long ago woman condemned for practicing "physick," or herbal healing, on her neighbors in 1690s Salem.

Conversion

It's senior year at St. Joan's Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys' texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can't. First it's the school's queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: Seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan's buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.

The Hawley Book of the Dead: A Novel

Revelation "Reve" Dyer grew up with her grandmother’s family stories, stretching back centuries to Reve’s ancestors, who founded the town of Hawley Five Corners, Massachusetts. Their history is steeped in secrets, for few outsiders know that an ancient magic runs in the Dyer women’s blood, and that Reve is a magician whose powers are all too real. Reve and her husband are world-famous Las Vegas illusionists. They have three lovely young daughters, a beautiful home, and what seems like a charmed life. But Reve’s world is shattered....

The Witches of New York: A Novel

New York in the spring of 1880 is a place alive with wonder and curiosity. Determined to learn the truth about the world, its residents enthusiastically engage in both scientific experimentation and spiritualist pursuits. Séances are the entertainment of choice in exclusive social circles, and many enterprising women - some possessed of true intuitive powers and some gifted with the art of performance - find work as mediums.

The Midnight Witch

Lady Lilith Montgomery is the daughter of the sixth Duke of Radnor. She is one of the most beautiful young women in London and engaged to the city’s most eligible bachelor. She is also a witch. When her father dies, her hapless brother Freddie takes on his title. But it is Lilith, instructed in the art of necromancy, who inherits their father’s role as Head Witch of the Lazarus Coven. And it is Lilith who must face the threat of the Sentinels, a powerful group of sorcerers intent on reclaiming the Elixir from the coven’s guardianship for their own dark purposes.

The Accidental Alchemist

Unpacking her belongings in her new hometown of Portland, Oregon, herbalist and reformed alchemist Zoe Faust can't help but notice she's picked up a stowaway. Dorian Robert-Houdin is a living, breathing three-and-half-foot gargoyle - not to mention a master of French cuisine - and he needs Zoe's expertise to decipher a centuries-old text. Zoe, who's trying to put her old life behind her, isn't so sure she wants to reopen her alchemical past... until the dead man on her porch leaves her no choice.

The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home - a house, perched on the edge of a bluff, that is slowly crumbling toward the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a traveling carnival reading tarot cards and seldom calls.

The Line: Witching Savannah, Book 1

To the uninitiated, Savannah shows only her bright face and genteel manner. Those who know her well, though, can see beyond her colonial trappings and small-city charm to a world where witchcraft is respected, Hoodoo is feared, and spirits linger. Mercy Taylor is all too familiar with the supernatural side of Savannah, being a member of the most powerful family of witches in the South. Despite being powerless herself, of course. Having grown up without magic of her own, in the shadow of her talented and charismatic twin sister, Mercy has always thought herself content.

The Last Days of Magic: A Novel

Aisling, a goddess in human form, was born to rule both domains and - with her twin, Anya - unite the Celts with the powerful faeries of the Middle Kingdom. But within medieval Ireland, interests are divided, and far from its shores greater forces are mustering. Both England and Rome have a stake in driving magic from the Emerald Isle. Jordan, the Vatican commander tasked with vanquishing the remnants of otherworldly creatures from a disenchanted Europe, has built a career on such plots.

The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

Mary Jekyll, alone and penniless following her parents' deaths, is curious about the secrets of her father's mysterious past. One clue in particular hints that Edward Hyde, her father's former friend and a murderer, may be nearby, and there is a reward for information leading to his capture...a reward that would solve all of her immediate financial woes. But her hunt leads her to Hyde's daughter, Diana, a feral child left to be raised by nuns.

Darkfever: Fever, Book 1

MacKayla Lane's life is good. She has great friends, a decent job, and a car that breaks down only every other week or so. In other words, she's your perfectly ordinary 21st-century woman. Or so she thinks...until something extraordinary happens.

The Witching Hour

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches - a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women....

Lamp Black, Wolf Grey: A Novel

Artist Laura Matthews finds her new home in the Welsh mountains to be a place so charged with tales and legends that she is able to reach through the gossamer-fine veil that separates her own world from that of myth and fable. She and her husband, Dan, have given up their city life and moved to Blaencwm, an ancient longhouse high in the hills. Here, she hopes that the wild beauty will inspire her to produce her best art and will give her the baby they have longed for.

A Discovery of Witches

Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library.

Spinning the Moon

In the Shadow of the Moon: When Laura Truitt first sees the dilapidated plantation house, she's overcome by a sense of familiarity. Inside, the owner claims to have been waiting for years and offers an old photograph of a woman with Laura's face. Soon afterward, when a lunar eclipse inexplicably thrusts Laura back in time to Civil War Georgia, she finds herself fighting not just for her heart but for her very survival.

A Court of Thorns and Roses

When 19-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast-like creature arrives to demand retribution for it. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she only knows about from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not an animal, but Tamlin - one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled their world.

Virgins: An Outlander Short

Mourning the death of his father and gravely injured at the hands of the English, Jamie Fraser finds himself running with a band of mercenaries in the French countryside, where he reconnects with his old friend, Ian Murray. Both are nursing wounds, both have good reason to stay out of Scotland, and both are still virgins despite several opportunities to remedy that deplorable situation with ladies of easy virtue.

The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year, and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind - she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.

Relatively Dead: Relatively Dead Mysteries, Book 1

Abby Kimball has just moved to New England with her boyfriend and is trying to settle in, but the experience is proving to be quite unsettling, to say the least. While on a tour of local historic homes, Abby witnesses a family scene that leaves her gasping for breath - because the family has been dead for nearly a century. Another haunting episode follows, and another, until it seems to Abby that everything she touches is drawing her in, calling to her from the past.

Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet

Maire is a baker with an extraordinary gift: she can infuse her treats with emotions and abilities, which are then passed on to those who eat them. She doesn't know why she can do this and remembers nothing of who she is or where she came from. When marauders raid her town, Maire is captured and sold to the eccentric Allemas, who enslaves her and demands that she produce sinister confections, including a witch's gingerbread cottage, a living cookie boy, and size-altering cakes.

The Lady of the Rivers

Jacquetta always has had the gift of second sight. As a child visiting her uncle, she met his prisoner, Joan of Arc, and saw her own power reflected in the young woman accused of witchcraft. They share the mystery of the tarot card of the wheel of fortune before Joan is taken to a horrific death. Jacquetta understands the danger for a woman who dares to dream. Jacquetta is married to the Duke of Bedford, English regent of France, and he introduces her to a mysterious world of learning and alchemy.

The Historian

Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor", and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of - a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

Lady Midnight: The Dark Artifices, Book 1

Together with her parabatai, Julian Blackthorn, Emma must learn to trust her head and her heart as she investigates a demonic plot that stretches across Los Angeles, from the Sunset Strip to the enchanted sea that pounds the beaches of Santa Monica. If only her heart didn't lead her in treacherous directions....

Publisher's Summary

Katherine Howe, author of the phenomenal New York Times best seller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, returns with an entrancing historical novel set in Boston in 1915, where a young woman stands on the cusp of a new century, torn between loss and love, driven to seek answers in the depths of a crystal ball.

Still reeling from the deaths of her mother and sister on the Titanic, Sibyl Allston is living a life of quiet desperation with her taciturn father and scandal-plagued brother in an elegant town house in Boston's Back Bay. Trapped in a world over which she has no control, Sibyl flees for solace to the parlor of a table-turning medium.

But when her brother is suddenly kicked out of Harvard under mysterious circumstances and falls under the sway of a strange young woman, Sibyl turns for help to psychology professor Benton Derby, despite the unspoken tensions of their shared past. As Benton and Sibyl work together to solve a harrowing mystery, their long-simmering spark flares to life, and they realize that there may be something even more magical between them than a medium's crying glass.

From the opium dens of Boston's Chinatown to the opulent salons of high society, from the back alleys of colonial Shanghai to the decks of the Titanic,The House of Velvet and Glass weaves together meticulous period detail, intoxicating romance, and a final shocking twist that will leave readers breathless.

What the Critics Say

“Richly atmospheric, The House of Velvet and Glass transported me to the turn of the 20th century and a world changing as rapidly and irrevocably as our own. A gifted historian and storyteller, Katherine Howe has created a vividly imagined world that made me want to suspend time, lingering just a bit longer with the characters who live there, before the whole thing vanished in the clouded glass.” (Brunonia Barry, author of The Lace Reader and The Map of True Places)

“Katherine Howe follows up her amazing debut with The House of Velvet and Glass, a thoughtful journey into the realms of the supernatural that inhabits its source material with effortless ease and charm. A totally absorbing read peopled with characters who will haunt readers’ minds.” (David Liss, author of The Twelfth Enchantment and A Conspiracy of Paper)

“The House of Velvet and Glass is an intricate and intimate family portrait, painted against a backdrop of beautifully rendered tales of colonialist Shanghai, the wreck of the Titanic, and upper-crust Boston dabblers in the spirit world in the uneasy days preceding the Great War. I’d ask Katherine Howe for more than this, but it seems churlish to request that she turn the pages for me.” (Lyndsay Faye, author of The Gods of Gotham and Dust and Shadow)

I am not a Titantic fan, but if you are considering this download because you are, know those sections are a small part of the novel, though that tragedy colours the entire narrative.

I downloaded this mainly because of the blurbs promising an "atmospheric" read/listen - Maybe it's better read; The narrator seems the wrong choice to create period atmosphere.

I???m not sure which novel unleashed the stream of recent historical fiction with storylines exploring the beginnings of psychiatry, but it takes a very skillful novelist to do that well ??? this is a near miss on that count, too.

The author recreates the external world well, but could have learned from Edith Wharton???s tone and characterization style to weave a more convincing story. There are also small continuity errors ??? not due to the interlude flashbacks (which were well-done) but more like editing glitches between drafts. I wouldn???t have noticed these in a better paced narrative. I enjoy a tale told slowly and gently, but that pace didn't suit here. Unless I was really tired when listening, I played long sections on double speed and felt that I missed nothing. There are some very good parts to the novel, but it was an unsatisfying whole, as assembled. This author is better than this -- I look forward to her next book.

The bones of this story seemed so good: An exploration of how love may redeem grief, woven around a plot that include the Titanic disaster, spiritualism, and the social upheavals of the early 20th century. What could go wrong?

Well, for one thing, there isn't a single character who is not annoying in the extreme -- particularly the protagonist, Sybil, who has lost her mother and sister to drowning, and her almost-fiance to marriage. Sybil flutters and fidgets, whines and worries, and the author traps us with her in a paralytic mess of trivialities. Her mother and sister, drawn in flashbacks of their Titanic experience, are so shallow and screechy that you can't wait for the waters to close over their heads. And there is no apparent reason for anyone to loooove Benton, the object of Sybil's affections, who spends most of his time grabbing hunks of his thick dark hair and scowling and muttering.

But the annoyances of the characters are dwarfed by the irritation I felt with the narrator. In a voice that sounds like it belongs to a 13-year-old girl who is trying to suppress a bad case of the giggles, she coos and simpers and puts on a verbal frowny face when something bad happens. She growls the voices of the male characters and make the Irish maid sound like a leprechaun while Benton, for some reason, seems to have time-travelled back from Soviet Russia. Granted, she has some painfully stilted dialogue and a fussbudget of a plot to work with, but did she really have to deliver the entire novel as though it were a hellishly long version of Goodnight Moon?

Not that I listened to the entire novel. I tried, God how I tried. I got about a third of the way through and had to stop when I realized that the voice yelling "Shut up, you whiner!" at the speakers was mine. I not only stopped listening, I returned the selection so that I wouldn't have to see it on my devices and get annoyed all over again. I would recommend this book only as a passive-aggresive gesture toward my shallowest frienemy. Save your time and credits for a real story with at least one character you might like, narrated by a grownup.

The snail's pace of this work made me skip whole chapters. It was well-written but morose and dull. Good writing doesn't make up for a missing plot. Such a pity because the author has a good handle on description and mood (that is if it were meant to be so confusing and sad). I picked it up because I am fascinated with the only period in time in which things were changing as fast as they are right now, but I was awfully disappointed. I couldn't even figure out what the book was really about--the brother, the love interest who had previously jilted the main character, the salty, crusty old father, the medium? Ms Howe's prose was lovely, but it just couldn't make up for all that was missing. (Or for my inability to listen properly to description after description.)

Where does The House of Velvet and Glass rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I looked forward to every chance I had to listen to this story. I was moved, educated, surprised, as I heard the story of a family struck by tragedy - first on the Titanic, then in the Great War - and the secret it reveals about the survivors. The leisurely pacing takes you back in time to find a world that first appears less hurried than ours, but is in fact, racing ahead technologically, scientifically, socially while people struggle to keep up. Progress doesn't come without pain - and this family suffers when members struggle to control and understand an inherited 'gift' that comes with a heavy price. Heather Corrigan did a wonderful job capturing the difference personalities and conflicts - I will look for more stories featuring her as reader.

I really loved Katherine Howe's last book, but this one was a real yawner! The character development was poor and the "mystery" was not intriguing...just boring. I really wanted to like this but I was starting to dread my listening time so I gave up about 3/4 of the way in and I almost never do that. I cannot recommend this book to anyone.

Not awful, but the narration was cloying and the historical elements to the story seemed really forced. The dialogue also seemed pretty inaccurate for the time period. I guess I'm not much of a fan of historical fiction, it always seems a bit goofy to me. I don't know why I bothered with this one.